


high tide

by attheborder



Category: The OA (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dimension 2, F/M, Post-Part II, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 11:46:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18468295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: After integration, what happens to the minds left behind?





	high tide

When he wakes up she is beside him, dressed in black.

“Dr. Roberts?”

He blinks, becoming aware of his body, of the bandage stretched taut over his chest; of the gently radiating pain with its opiate-dulled edges; of the polyester itch of a hospital gown; of the dry burn in his throat and the roar in his ears.

And he is becoming aware of his mind, of the native memories and contours of his own thoughts; of the strange knowledge terrifyingly and abnormally familiar; of the empty spaces left by a presence recently departed.

And he is becoming aware of _her._ Golden hair, falling in perfect waves below that face like a cut jewel, dark-red mouth a rose opening to the sun, delicate scent reaching him like birdsong on the wind.

"OA?”

He knows he’s gotten it wrong as the name leaves his lips. She shakes her head. She is grieving a loss; the same as him.

“It’s me. Nina. And you...”

She wants him to say his name. But he can barely speak.

And he’d never _liked_ it anyway, his first name, so clunky, so unfashionable; after the end of his athletic career he'd made a half-hearted attempt to abandon it and begin going by his middle name, James, but it was too much work to change over and so he reverted, but he’d still felt apart from it, further away from Homer the football player as he dove deeper into academia and medical school—

_“Are you Homer, or Dr. Roberts?”_

_“Both. I’m… both.”_

And he’s still both, but _not_ , somehow. A beautiful carving has been pulled off the table, completed, and he is simply the shavings that are left, and he’ll do anything to stop them from getting swept away.

From the hospital bed, he looks up at Nina.

“Just call me Homer.”

***

She takes him home; she tells him how her engagement had been called off minutes before the arrival on the ferry; she watches with pleasure as he drinks in the visual and tactile luxury of her penthouse, sweeping his hand across the cream sofa and marble mantel.

Atop the crisp linens of Nina’s bed they act out the desires of distant selves. It is an instinct baser than hunger, one they could not resist if they tried; they are incapable of anything other than wanting.

Nina pulls Homer deeper and deeper into her, she’s lunar and he is helpless against the high tide. She is lithe and acrobatic, riding him so expertly he forgets about the gaping wound in his back, and they come together, gasping, as if they’ve fucked a thousand times before, as if this isn’t his first time inside her. Homer nearly lets a moan of “ _OA”_ leave his lips but swallows it, ashamed, turns it into a wordless whisper as he presses himself up to kiss her.

They rest; Nina opens a bottle of wine; Homer drinks despite knowing he shouldn’t ignore the prohibitions set down per his many prescriptions— is that something Dr. Roberts would have done? Or is that Homer, the careless, fearless romantic rising to the surface?

He leans back on the couch, his hands to his temples, a dissonant pain blooming inside of his skull as memories and impulses jostle for dominance. Nina is next to him, comforting him, caressing his face, and looking into her eyes he sees the same hurt he feels, mirrored precisely, supernaturally.

Homer takes Nina into his arms, then, and they cry for selves gone and for the parts that remain. She takes him back to bed, and they fall asleep, exhausted, wrapped in each other, dreaming of who they never were and would never get to be.

In the morning Homer wakes to find Nina staring out of her bedroom window, the curve of her breast illuminated through her sheer nightgown by the rising sun, and though his bandaged torso throbs with pain he cannot ignore his hardness and so he calls Nina back to him on the bed and they fuck again, slowly, this time as if it were not the thousandth time or the second time but the very, very beginning.

***

Together they are satellites revolving around planets in eclipse. They cannot know what is happening, downstream in that dark destination, but memories are clear enough, perhaps too clear. Nina recalls Hap taunting OA with a sinister plan, to take her to a dimension where she’d forget herself. Homer remembers commanding Scott to recount his NDE, on the orders of someone he believed to be Dr. Percy but who he now knew to be Hap.

It is easy enough to put the puzzle pieces together in the aftermath, but it is maddeningly difficult to not be able to do anything about it. The memories of the movements are fragmented, not imbued with the will needed to activate that mysterious travel.

The parts of Homer left behind by another version of himself are sick with worry about a woman he barely knows, who was not native to his dimension and no longer exists inside of it— except in corresponding parts inside the mind of the woman whose apartment he has taken up residence inside of. He occupies her heart as well, he knows this, they cannot be torn apart as long as these fragments persist, but after a few days pass he finds he cannot recall the name of the mother of his son— not his, but _his_ son, other-Homer’s— and this terrifies him.

Nina has a theory, which she explains to Homer over coffee one morning, after another night of desperate dreams when they had sought refuge in each other’s touch, and after Homer has revealed his fear that the fragments are beginning to take their leave.

“She met me at SYZYGY,” Nina murmurs, her Russian accent like velvet draping over her words, “and I thought— _OA_ thought— she was someone who had jumped away, and then returned. It was a logical assumption to make, with the information OA had at the time. But I think, now, she was like us. Elodie had integrated with her host here and once gone, had left her with… an _imprint_. And a mission.”

“And after she told you what she needed to? What do you think happened to her? Could we find her?”

Nina shakes her head. “I tried. Yesterday. I worked up the courage— I found a number. I called it.”

Homer’s eyes widen. “... _And??”_

A smile, wistful. “She doesn’t remember. Not at all. The imprint has gone.”

“So… we might….” Homer cannot complete the thought. It is too terrifying to contemplate.

Nina’s face grows serious. Across the table, she takes Homer’s hand in hers. “We will never forget.” And he believes her.

***

Homer wonders: _do they know?_

Do they know what happens to the left-behind, to the integrated, the imprinted?

Do they have any idea of the ache that trails behind them, the unearthly pain the ones who jump leave in their wake? The sad mimicry that the imprinted must practice, that reenactment like shadows on the cave wall, a parody of the real thing but impossible to give up if it meant the loss of memories that have become improbably and all-encompassingly _important_.

They can't possibly know that Homer and Nina sit for hours at a time, telling stories of Prairie, of the underground cages, of Crestwood, of an unseen son, of movements and tears and hope and terror— constantly stirring those memories to the surface, preventing them from settling, from fading, from dissipating into the dimensional current. And it hurts, to carve these pathways out again and again, to force this remembrance of trauma like so many drills on a football field.

But it is the only way not to forget. Dr. Roberts’ training can tell him this much.

***

Homer does not tell Nina where he is going when he leaves the apartment one afternoon, headed south to a hospital where there is a private wing, one for certain prestigious patients with certain stable and treatment-resistant conditions.

Inside a room on the ward he sweeps aside a curtain to reveal a familiar form, supine, motionless, connected to machines and tubes and monitors that beep the same signs over and over, marking the minutes of a man barely clinging to life.

Memories battle inside Homer's mind as he stares at the comatose body of Dr. Hunter Percy. This is his hero, his mentor, his idol, struck down in his prime by a vicious disease— yes, that is a good way to think of Hap, a virus, an organism so alien that Dr. Percy’s consciousness suffocated and died, wilting under a rigid resistance to integration that was as harsh and toxic as the carbon monoxide that heralded its arrival.

A nurse appears at the door. Homer tells her to please let Dr. Percy’s beard and hair grow back, if she can, he has a picture on his phone of himself and the doctor at a clinic staff holiday party from last year that he shows her, for reference. She nods, agrees, and Homer resists an urge to make her promise, to _swear_ , to shake her by the shoulders until he _knows_ that if Dr. Percy wakes up, he will be back in a body that belongs to him, and not one territorially claimed by an invading force, like trenches dug on a battlefield.

And now the battle is over, and of course there are casualties, but why did it have to be Dr. Percy? He knows the answer, Nina had told him, it has to do with echoes across dimensions, they are all locked together like a constellation— but he cries out at the insensibility of it all anyways.

“Dr. Percy, I’m sorry,” Homer says. “If you can hear me… I’m sorry for what he did to you. I’ll figure out how to bring you back. I promise.”

He leaves a purple orchid on the doctor’s bedside, hoping the scent will reach him deep inside whatever dream Hap had locked him in before departing, uncaringly, taking the key with him.

***

This Homer is not the one the OA loves. He knows this, he’s not dumb. But that Homer left him with fragments, remnants, seeds, that are making his mind a garden, one that he is loyally tending, cultivating, though the thorns prick him and the leaves give him itches that he can never scratch.

His sole comfort is that he knows Nina is the same. They may have had opposite experiences, but the end result had been identical. They have each other to reinforce the sagging frameworks of recollection, to lean against in this struggle towards understanding, and to bring to bodily ecstasy in those moments when the pain is too great to bear.

Homer wants to stay locked in Nina’s orbit forever, asymptotically approaching the blaze of light that is the Original Angel, close but never truly touching, not ever. He wants to sink into the memories and never leave, they are intoxicating with their layers of meaning, unfolding in the sunlight of his scrutiny.

But there is work to be done, here, surprisingly. It’s not over.

Dr. Roberts and Nina are needed in their native dimension, their fragmented memories so carefully cultivated able to offer a starting point for a journey whose endpoint is still shrouded in mystery.

There is a private investigator at the door; there is a tech billionaire on the phone.

And to the northeast, on Treasure Island, there is a dark-haired woman pulling an open-eyed boy out of a tepid pool, shivering and retching and alive.

 


End file.
